The dark side of success — Things that make you blind
Well, I know you would be thinking the title sounds like an oxymoron. Yes, it’s true for all the brands that stopped innovating or were too arrogant to see the future competition. We know the story of Apple eating the two giant brands of 2007 — Nokia and Blackberry. We know from the success of the Apple personal computer that Xerox failed to gauge it; it wasn’t nimble enough to transition to a brand-new market it had no experience with. Apple, however, had both the flexibility and initiative to take the ideas that Jobs saw at PARC (Xerox founded the Palo Alto Research Company) and build them into a machine primed for mass-market success. Well, the story goes on and on…
One common thing that you will see is that the new incumbent who disrupts the tech world always has an upper hand in agility and clarity. However, the one who enjoys success and stays in the ninth cloud fails to recognise the dark cloud of new entrants surrounding it.
Here I would like to quote on The Essence of Balance in Life from Hindu Scripture, Bhagavat Gita.
Embrace equanimity in life. Even at the most joyful times and moments of sheer euphoria, all of it is impermanent. With the passing of time, it will all fade away. And so, it is at times of grief and loss. It will, too, pass away. You can’t just love or just hate anybody; both of them come along; they are the two sides of the coin, and you never know which one flips.
It says to stay vigilant and balanced to know the future, and it should be the motto of every organization empowered by its CIO — I meant Chief Innovations Officer. There are a few fundamental innovation stumbling blocks:
Past success can cloud the future.
This strategic failure was the direct cause of Kodak’s decades-long decline as digital photography destroyed its film-based business model.
Earnings pressure and investor expectations
Adobe’s success story happened when it changed its business model from subscription-based services to licencing without getting derailed by earning pressure and investor expectations.
Too much reliance on customer feedback
Coca-Cola launched a new formula after soliciting customer feedback and then rolling it back.
New products hurt existing ones.
Amazon established a lead in online commerce, which was later recognised by Walmart, which is still gaining market share.
Process that maximises efficiency
A mastery of efficiency makes it difficult to become skilled at experimentation. As you can see, the innovation quotient (IQ) of a company goes down with time. If you want to scale, you have to become a well-oiled machine. However, it clouds your view of innovation.
As mentioned in the lecture by Professor Anil Gupta, the first step is to always remain humble and run scared. As Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, famously advised, only the paranoid survive.
